Academic

Bainbridge has often said that the Supreme Court all too rarely interprets the securities statutes, and by my count in the Spaeth Supreme Court database, he is on to something.  The Securities and Exchange Act has been subject to Supreme Court interpretation 49 times since enactment.  That?s about how many times the Court has interpreted the pretty obscure Labor and Management Relations Act.  It is barely more than the Court has interpreted ERISA.  And it is much less than the Court has interpreted the NLRA (123 times and passed roughly contemporaneously with the SEA) and Title VII (76 times since its passage three decades after the SEA).

Wat is it about employee relationships that gets the attention of the Court?  I suspect it is because there's more unsettleable litigation there, and more litigation generally.  But that sort of begs the question, too.  Anyway, it's kind of interesting that in a Supreme Court obsessed academy, there's more people who can tell you about securities regulation than about the NLRB or EEOC, but that's probably a useful corrective to the obsession.  You can read more about this sort of thing in my paper with David Law here.